Bruno, On and On

We all know people who don’t realize that they’re taking up more than their share of breathing room, whose nonstop agenda only serves to make their listeners believe the opposite of what they are arguing. Bruno is one of those people—and yes, Bruno, we know, you’re really not all that different from, and perhaps you’re even superior to, a human. We get it. I was previously unaware that there was such a thing as a pretentious chimp, a chimp who claims to be just learning language yet still uses words such as haruspices, popinjay, pinguid, pithecine, pellucid, opprobriously. A chimp who describes a chimp chase as such:

The chase ended only when Rotpeter—the Alpha Male and sole gubernative power over our pitifully tiny civilization, our sovereign, our lawgiver and enforcer, our Draco, Solon, Hammurabi and Caesar, oh you Leviathan, you, Rotpeter—you petty patriarch—dropped down from a tree and interpolated himself between us.

It’s too bad I’m not a fan of Bruno, because who wants to hate a chimp, especially one whose comings and goings take up 576 pages? When Bruno goes to live with his caretaker and soon-to-be lover, Lydia Littlemore, Benjamin Hale not only includes a numbered map of her apartment, but he spends eleven pages describing the layout—e.g., “The floors were of hard glossy wood, partially covered by a large circular area rug (4).” A bit later in the book, Hale, in one of many explanations of a nonhuman coming to terms with his human-ness, gives a three-page analysis of “Pinocchio.”

At times, Bruno accedes to some level of humility and his lack of knowledge in all things human (we’re treated to a lengthy description of bathrooms, and, specifically, toilets and their contents, to show that he really is just a clueless chimp), but rather than this being a relief, it contradicts the rest of the book, in which he professes to know an inordinate amount about human beings and the world at large. This discrepancy is extremely distracting. If Hale had chosen just one of these points of view, “Bruno” would have been more consistent, cleaner and shorter, and, chances are, it would have made his star chimp more of a sympathetic character (although, to be fair, I’m not sure what the author’s intentions were in this arena—maybe Bruno is supposed to be unlikable).

Perhaps the biggest problem for me is that I was unable to suspend my disbelief, to allow myself to succumb to the idea that Bruno and Lydia are actually able to interact in a way that allows them to fall in love as deeply as Hale would have the reader believe. When they first start sleeping together, there’s a scene in which they sit at the dinner table, drinking wine and having a “long and deep conversation,” with Lydia telling Bruno about her upbringing and then guiding him into the bedroom. In another part, the lovers walk in the door and “race immediately to the bedroom, articles of clothing flying from [their] persons all down the hall so that [they] arrived antecedently disrobed in [their] chamber of clandestine lust.” Lydia is having thoughtful and in-depth conversations with a chimp, getting drunk with him, making sweet love to him—and the reality kept bearing its head, despite my feeble attempts to hold it down: she is certifiably insane, and reading the book with that in mind makes it a completely different story.

Read what Ian, Jon, Vicky, and Macy had to say about “The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore.”

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